Brendon is a seasoned content strategist, architect, and operations professional who has specialized in building and steering DITA-XML implementations toward successful business outcomes. Brendon began his career with Jamf Software as a Technical Writer and Information Architect and currently is a Senior Content Strategist at Teradata where he leads the effort to bring content strategy to the forefront of the product experience and agentic AI experiences.

One Product, Many Names: How to Establish a Governed Vocabulary and Ontology with the Tools You Already Have

In software companies, it’s not uncommon to ask ten employees from different departments what the names of their products and features are and get ten different answers. Whose job is it to create consensus between these competing realities? This session describes how I used Teradata’s existing content delivery platform (Fluid Topics) as a source of truth to build both an authoritative graphical ontology explorer and an AI‑ready data source. Together, these provide context, constraints, and confidence for both humans and AI systems across the product ecosystem.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Tech content pros are uniquely positioned to govern overlapping realities — especially when marketing brands a product by one name, the development team calls it by a secret code name, and the UX team lands somewhere in between.
• How a CDP like Fluid Topics includes vocabulary tools that reconcile these differences in metadata, and how the same infrastructure principles can serve as the foundation for a simple ontology explorer that looks polished and credible. The result is a human‑ and machine‑readable presentation of your company’s ecosystem that helps onboard and ground both colleagues and customers. While other tools exist specifically for ontologies and knowledge graphs, it’s possible to govern product terminology with tools you already have. By keeping it simple and staying in the driver’s seat, rather than letting generative AI produce a graph out of the gate from live data, you can align terminology across teams without additional tooling spend.